The present disclosure relates generally to managing intellectual property, and in particular, to a method, system, and computer program product for collaborative and integrated intellectual property management.
The management of intellectual property tends to be sequential in nature, starting with the emergence of an innovative idea and ending with some form of implementation, financial and legal arrangement, and/or enforcement of the intellectual property rights. The current art focuses on the maintenance of documents pertaining to intellectual property for legal reasons, capabilities to search for prior art, tracking and providing status of intellectual property in database repositories, and automation of intellectual property evaluations. While these functions or capabilities provide a degree of control and productivity, they are not deemed optimal due to their lack of integration, management oversight, project management discipline, portfolio management, valuation management, and quality of the intellectual property submissions.
There are a number of deficiencies within the current intellectual property management processes such as a lack of management involvement, the failure to link an organization's strategy to the intellectual property portfolio, lack of knowledge by creators, innovators, evaluators, and legal professionals of the intellectual property management processes, lack of interactions between business developers and intellectual property portfolio managers, lengthy and bureaucratic processes that are not transparent to creators and innovators, chronic delays, heavy reliance on sequential processes with little value add provided between the various handoffs, capricious decision making by evaluators and legal professionals, lack of awareness of the advances in the field, and lack of timely rewards and recognition.
Existing solutions tend to rely or focus on point solutions or technology to meet individual problems at specific phases of the intellectual property process. However, none of these solutions addresses the end-to-end integration, especially the management system, portfolio management, oversight issues required to create and protect intellectual property, and the like. This generally requires project management with associated workflow between multiple user groups, and the optimal allocation and scheduling of constrained and skilled resources. Also noticeably absent from current solutions is the notion of intellectual property quality assessment and oversight.
One daunting challenge is the virtual collaboration of creators, innovators, business developers, and legal professionals at disparate locations, as well as the reduction of widespread inefficiencies within the intellectual property process. These process inefficiencies and lack of quality increase cycle times from intellectual property creation to implementation, maintenance and enforcement.
What is needed, therefore, is a way to integrate disparate elements of intellectual property processes, provide sound project management, increase intellectual property quality, and ensure timely workflow.